


. r a n d o m . a c c e s s . m e m o r i e s .

by cawdor



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2019-11-15 12:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18073064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cawdor/pseuds/cawdor
Summary: "I know that I hung on a wind-rocked tree, nine whole nights,with a spear wounded, and to Odin offered, myself to myself;on that tree, of which no one knows from what root it springs."-- The Poetic Edda,Translation by Benjamin ThorpeSomewhere else, events are set in motion, and an end is nearing.Meanwhile, an end has arrived, yet events are about to occur somewhere altogether else.Once again, we return.





	1. end of line (2 May 2015)

**Author's Note:**

> ( **SPOILERS** for plenty of _The Wicked + The Divine_ , #42 in particular.)
> 
> A story in ten chapters. (The prelude, and "nine nights on a wind-rocked tree".) 
> 
> This will not be finished until the comic is over. I've had a few theories about _WicDiv_ that were confirmed in the last few issues - which would've made me look very clever and incredibly interesting if I had just finished these chapters sooner. But this isn't about looking clever. I just want to write a tribute to this series that affected me so profoundly, and to simply offer a story - specifically, a story about a story, and the telling of stories. Whether or not it'll be of interest is, of course, subjective.
> 
> No, Woden will never cease to be my most problematic of favourites.
> 
> \- - -
> 
> At a Toronto Comic Arts Festival panel, Kieron Gillen talked about playlists as tarot decks; songs as cards in spreads. In that spirit, and in the spirit of _WicDiv_ in general, there's also a (currently still growing) playlist for Random Access Memories. Sometimes a song's melody inspires the chapters, sometimes the lyrics do, sometimes just some of the lyrics do, sometimes just the titles do. Sometimes they just do and I couldn't tell you why. For the sake of interest, you're free to have a look at it. 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/user/21my67hisdaa5hhy4xilv6mcq/playlist/5WWoTiaQ4wiuKDf1ouX7Fp?si=hrHOMWhTSJGAUDHe-Htk2Q

> _"When it comes to living, dying is the easy part."_
> 
> \- _Carnivàle_ : 'New Canaan, CA'

 

* * *

 

 

You'd think I'd be panicking.

 

\-- fingertips are digging through my armor and my skin and --

 

I was panicking just a few seconds earlier.

 

(Stupid. And pointless.)

 

(Last words not those of a serf or a toy but of vermin crushed underfoot. _"Wait!" "Just let me go." "I'm out of this."_ )

 

(Pathetic.)

 

I don't even blame her -- if the roles were reversed --

 

I'd do the exact same thing.

 

 _La Petit Mort_. I used to think it was some morbidly perverse bohemian ideal - leave it to the French. But if I'm being honest ...

 

(Fingers and hands, prodding and pulling, muscles spasming and tensing...)

 

Yeah.

 

I'm starting to see the metaphor.

 

There are a thousand better ways to go. But this seems --

 

(The visor cracks under the pressure.)

 

\-- beyond appropriate and --

 

I'm not panicking.

 

(She's saying something but her voice is close and impossibly distant both at once. I can't make out what she's saying. I don't care. I'd rather spend these last few seconds without her.)

 

I feel myself go into shock and everything goes still. The moments pass, surreal. I can hear the rending noises and feel the warmth of blood and viscera, I feel sinews give, but I'm not really there. I sense everything but the sensations.

 

_'I must not fear.'_

 

I can't believe these are my last thoughts --

 

_'Fear is the mind-killer.'_

 

\-- hell, I should've read better books. But you know --

 

(There is a raw, obscenely powerful tug, and there goes my left shoulder with the sharp popping sound of flesh ripping and cartilage being dismantled.)

 

\-- it's a toss-up between this and _Ice and Fire_ ; they're good life lessons --

 

(The visor splinters to pieces and hands are digging into my gut and squirm before finding something - could be bone, could be muscle, I don't know anymore - to leverage against. There are some tenacious nerve endings below the ribcage, but not that far in. Just more pushing and nudging and --)

 

\-- because everyone in them is a goddamn liar, _especially_ the messiahs. There are no saints. The selfish are doomed to die and the selfless doomed to die sooner, and the fathers are impotent canon fodder and the sons make their own mistakes, and everyone ends miserably --

 

(I'm being taken to pieces and finally,  _finally_ , fingers curl into my eyesocket, hollowing it out, and for a single exalted second I _am_ Woden, one-eyed, all-knowing, frenzied, gallows-god, and everything is agony but everything is exactly how it's meant to be, and I can't tell you if it's worth dying for but I see so clearly and I've never before felt that brittle piece of divinity inside of me this acutely, not in all this time. I know I don't deserve it. But it's in there, coming apart like the rest of me.)

 

\-- I'm sorry, I'm _sorry,_ if you are the Rememberer, the Wise, if anything about this is true, and I don't really know but just - run. Jon, just - run. I tried. I know I promised I'd ... I thought I could stop her. I thought if I pulled everything together ... I thought I could do it. I thought --

 

And then finally, there's nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

Until there isn't.


	2. the old gods and the new ( 2? May? 2019? )

> _"ROS: We could play at questions._   
>  _GUIL: What good would that do?_   
>  _ROS: Practice! [ . . . ]_   
>  _GUIL: What in God's name is going on?_   
>  _ROS: Foul! No rhetoric. Two-one."_
> 
>   
> \-- Tom Stoppard, _'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead'_

 

* * *

 

 

I wake ( _wake?_ How is that even possible? I wasn't asleep, I was -) to a skittering of small claws on tree bark. A squirrel, winter coat a dusted auburn, stops its climb right beside me - tail flicking; alert, curious. It lets out a questioning, keening noise, almost a chirp, and then darts upwards.

 

_Upwards._

 

The tree is gigantic. It is all-encompassing. The canopy blots out the sky, the branches reach for thousands of miles into all directions. It's ancient and vast, almost incomprehensibly so. I find myself whole again, not a piece missing, _and I don't understand what's happening_ , I don't understand what _this_ is. My back is pinned against the trunk -- literally. There is a blunt, persistent pain, immediately given context when I feel the spear that's been driven through me and into the wood. Just under the collarbone, supporting my weight as I find myself suspended not too far above weaving, powerful roots. There's no blood, but the spear is inescapable. Somewhere far away is a guttural, gnawing sound, and a shape that twists and curls.

 

It's all too much. This is ridiculous. This is impossible.

 

This is Yggdrasil, the World Tree, the Gallows-Tree, _axis mundi_ , and I struggle to keep coherent thoughts in my head anymore.

 

"You shouldn't listen to him," a voice not too far below tells me, conversationally. It's an old woman, draped in the robes of some ancient culture - I don't recognize them. Her face is is marked in intricate linework -- it's hard to tell from here. I could swear I know her, but she is a stranger. A pause. She gestures the direction the squirrel had taken, as to clarify. "He's a terrible gossip."

 

"I --" I'm at a loss for words. I'm still reeling. I find myself moving my head slightly, a 'no'. "I wasn't planning on it."

 

She smiles, measured but genuine, and then settles by a spring at the tree's roots. "Good. See? You're already learning."

 

"Learning," I echo, confused; almost a question, but not quite. "I don't understand."

 

"That much has been evident for quite some time, David," she replies, fingertips brushing the water; where they do, the stirred surface shimmers, unearthly.

 

She knows me. Somehow, that's reassuring. At least _this_ . . . whatever it is . . . has an internal logic. She looks -- she reminds me of -- it couldn't be Ananke. Or maybe it could -- who knows who or _what_ she is anymore?

 

"I am not my sister," she says, a direct answer -- the moment it crossed my mind. She can read my thoughts. Of course she can. Why am I not surprised.

 

"Your sister? Ananke has -- you are --"

 

"Oh. Of course. I expect she wouldn't talk about me," the woman shrugs. "It doesn't matter either way."

 

I'm struggling to pull my thoughts together. Yggdrasil. Then ... the gnawing is Níðhöggr, the squirrel Ratatoskr. And the well is  -- this is where things fall apart.

 

"You're not one of the Norns," I say, thinking out loud.

 

"Who's to say? 'One woman in her time plays many parts,'" she muses. "But you are correct. I am not one of them. Would you have them here, if you could?"

 

"I don't ... I ... no."

 

"Would you have _Urðr_ here, if you could?"

 

I feel my heart constrict, muscles tense. The dull ache of the spear running through me intensifies at the movement.

 

She _knows._

 

The true implications of that are only setting in now.

 

I haven't got the faintest idea as to who or what she is, but she knows me and everything about me. Or at least, it stands to reason. And if she knows everything about _me_ , she knows everything about considerably _more_ than just me, and I don't know where it stops, and it's _terrifying_.

 

I have a choice, here. I can be truthful, or I can lie. I'm not one to delude myself; I've always had that choice. I'd gotten so very good at lying in my time, and when the Recurrence kicked off, it had become second nature. Why? For leverage. Which, it turns out, I never really had. For survival. That also went out the window. A good lie tends to be more rewarding than a clumsy truth, but as it turns out, either only gets you so far.

 

Given the situation - all things being actually equal for once - I'll treat myself to some honesty.

 

"On a gut level? Yes. Very much. But she's got good reason to hate so much as the thought of me. There's no reason to subject her to this." 

 

"Hmh," she replies, her expression unreadable. "Honest and considerate. A bit of a departure, isn't it? But all the better. Maybe our time here won't be wasted, then."

 

"Where _is_ here?"

 

"You, of all people, should be able to figure this out."

 

"I know it's Yggdrasil. I know all of this. Pinned by Gungnir, above the dragon and the fates. I'm not asking about the set dressing." 

 

"You are Woden. Is it not appropriate?"

 

"I'm not - I never was --," the words get stuck in my throat somehow. Is she toying with me? "I'm not Woden, you should know that."

 

She regards me for a few moments that drag on forever. Tilts her head. The moments pass and she picks up a wooden bowl, holding it in the spring, letting the water gather in it. It glows a soft near-turqoise blue, an aurora in a cup.

 

"That's the trouble with you, isn't it?" she muses, her bare feet gently, easily find a way across the roots, her steps sure and never swaying. "Part of it, anyway. You do not know yourself. Or others. For a clever man, you know remarkably little."

 

I don't argue. Not because I'm afraid of her (though I am, and I think I should be) and not because it wouldn't get me anywhere (though it wouldn't, and I know it wouldn't), but because ... hell. All things that happened considered, she's not wrong.

 

"Am I dead?" Finally. There. The elephant in the room has been acknowledged.

 

She smirks.

 

"Persephone is in hell," she says, and I feel my skin crawl. _What is this place. Who is this woman._ "But is she dead? There are states beyond the binary. Beyond the obvious. This is Yggdrasil. The dead do not come to Yggdrasil, as you well know. Now --"

 

She raises the cup to my lips. Oh, hell. What's the worst that can happen? I drink -- the water is pure, crystalline, and it radiates a soft early December chill that spreads through every part of me. I feel my thoughts clear and my mind quiet itself.

 

"What happens now?" I ask. I'm beginning to comprehend. There are rules to this place. Woden offered himself to Yggdrasil, but not forever. I had significantly less choice in being brought here, but my stay, too, will be temporary. What comes after, I can no longer guess. Nothing is real and everything is real. It could be nothing. It could be anything. It could be everything. I feel like I'm going mad, but I don't think anything could be further from the truth.

 

"Questions."

 

"Don't tell me. Four of them."

 

"A quick learner," she smirks. "Yes. Four questions. Answer each correctly, and you're free to go."

 

"To go where?"

 

"Once you answer them, you'll no longer need to ask me that. Now. One: who are you?"

 

"David Blake."

 

"Not false, but not the truth. Two: who am I?"

 

"I don't know. A god, maybe."

 

"Flattery is appreciated, but gets you nowhere. No, not quite. Speaking of ... three: what is at the heart of the gods?"

 

Strange wording. It takes me a moment or two to contemplate the shift in tone and the question.

 

"Power. Influence."

 

She shakes her head briefly, with some exasperation. "No. I can see we still have some ways to go. Four: what is at the heart of everything?"

 

How am I supposed to know that? How am I supposed to have an answer to it? One of the greatest questions in the history of mankind and I'm supposed to just work it out?

 

"Life?"

 

"Certainly a requirement, but -- no. Don't worry. Early days. You'll have the answers, in time."

 

"You seem certain."

 

"Some things are necessary. Some things are inevitable. Some things are both."

 

She steps away, tracing the same footpath down the roots of the ancient ash, toward the mist and undergrowth below.

 

"Rest. Think. I will return."

 

And she's gone. The branches of the trees sway slightly in some faraway wind. Nothing makes sense anymore. Maybe in time it will again. I allow myself deep breaths, and do the only things I can: I rest, I think, and I remember.


	3. human after all ( 2? May? . . . ? )

> _"I am the wound and the dagger!_

> _I am the blow and the cheek!_

> _I am the members and the wheel,_

> _Victim and executioner!_

> _I'm the vampire of my own heart."_

> \- Charles Baudelaire, _Les Fleurs du mal_
> 
>  

* * *

 

 

_[ Ananke is Minerva. They're the same person. Please. Get out. ]_

 

The message is burned into the heart of me. Measuring the passage of time here is impossible in any reliable sense beyond day and night, but it keeps crawling through every vein, again and again. I don't spend a minute without it. It's in my pulse and between my teeth and inscribed into my eyes in sharp cuneiform. 

 

I remember it more clearly than my _outstandingly_ impotent appeal to Ananke. (Or Minerva. Or both. Or what that gestalt entity slinking through history _really_ is.) It's in sharper focus than the memory of dying. It's shrapnel in my mind. It bleeds through thought and tissue.

 

Even after everything, he'd tried to warn me. After all of it.

 

I don't deserve him.

 

I don't deserve anyone.

 

I never did.

 

 

The tree sways, bark groaning like tectonic plates shifting, and I've ceased being news to Ratatoskr in the squirrel's endless flitting from roots to foliage and back again. He watches and hurries on, carrying his news to Níðhöggr below and the eagle in the branches far above.

 

That's a curious thing. Everything here has a name, except the eagle. The serpent has a name. The squirrel has a name. The tree has a name. The spear running me through has a name. The Norns have names. All the things in all the realms have names. The eagle - nothing. The eagle that stands in opposition to the serpent of entropy has no name at all.

 

Maybe the name has been lost to time. Maybe it is a force so vital to existence, so necessary to life and hope, that a world without it would seem impossible, that it was enough for the eagle to simply be, unnamed and unnameable. Or maybe -- given the bleak, brutal culture from which these stories came -- the death of everything and the twilight of the gods having been thought inevitable, any opposing force would have been considered meaningless. There was no point in naming a thing whose existence accomplishes nothing.

 

 

I was twelve when I first read about the Recurrence. I remember knowing instinctively and immediately that I'd spend my life learning about it. Sure, I grew into my cynicism in due time, but -- if there was the slightest chance, the slightest possibility that the stories were true, that gods might exist and come to walk among us, why would I waste my time with anything else? The truth of all mythology, the fountain of all inspiration, the meaning to all endeavors, the root of all power -- it's theology on cocaine. It's what theology aspires to be. It's what all history aspires to be. Gods. Actual gods. If they're real, what else might be real? If they're real, what could possibly take precedence over learning about them?

 

When I was thirteen, I knew the next Recurrence would occur during my lifetime. It should've felt like a gift. But then ...

 

Stories are open to interpretation; numbers? Rarely. By the time of the Recurrence, my youth would have eluded me. I'd be too old to be chosen. Too old for it to mean anything.

 

But, I decided, not too old for _me_ to mean anything. If I could not be a god, I would be the man who _understood_ the gods. Knowledge is power. (If it hadn't been for the fact that in the end, the knowledge had been so incomplete that the power had been likewise lacking.) The Recurrence superseded everything. Certainly _her._

 

I ... loved her. I did. But she knew my priorities -- claimed to understand. Maybe she was lying, waiting to push things her way -- wouldn't put it past her. Or maybe she thought I'd change. For love. For her.

 

For Jon.

 

I suppose I did, in a way. But I couldn't just -- couldn't just _abandon_ it, not so close to the date.

 

And then she was gone; and there I was. Single parent, watching the years tick away. And for all those years, I couldn't decide which of the three of us I hated the most.

 

  
  
  
Sometimes life provides problems to add to your own. Sometimes it provides solutions. Problems and solutions tend to look a lot alike.

 

 

 

It was some morning when Jon was at school. I remember the grey February sky dull against her mantle, only a few hues off, her eyes luminous and purple under her veil.

 

"David Blake," she'd said, unreadable. "I've been looking for a man like you."

 

 

  
_[ Ananke is Minerva. They're the same person. Please. Get out. ]_

 

 

 

No.

 

God -- no. _Please._

 

 

 

She played me from the start. I thought I could outplay her, and if that wasn't hubris, I don't know what is.

 

 

 

( "Like Isaac," she'd said, softly.

 

"You say that," I'd told her. "But I don't see a ram anywhere."

 

"Ah, stories live in the retelling. Constants and variables. Jon will live. As will you. And you'll get the chance to play your story. That is what you wanted, yes?" )

 

 

 

I said yes. Of course I said yes.

 

To hell with me.

 

But then ... I'm already there, aren't I?

 

 

 

It's one of those things you carry with you.

 

 

 

And all that -- for what? To play the lackey. To play pretend. Fleeting importance and fleeting pleasures. The taking and the having was good at first, but it's never enough. What point in taking if you can't have what you truly want? What point in having if it's never yours to keep? What point in anything if there's a chain around your neck that feels suspiciously like a noose?

 

I lived like a king. I lived like a serf.

 

_I was never a god._

 

 

 

At that thought, I feel something sigh -- wind breathing through my ribcage, my throat, something lifting, releasing a stranglehold I didn't realize was there. I have no idea what it was.

 

 

 

On the roots below, the woman reappears. How long has it been? I'm not sure it matters.

 

"You look better," she says, calmly making her way to the spring below, to gather another bowl of water.

 

She still looks -- seems -- familiar. A stranger whose face I've seen a thousand times but don't remember.

 

"I don't _feel_ better," I tell her.

 

"Some things take time," she replies, shrugging slightly. "How _do_ you feel?"

 

 

  
_[ Ananke is Minerva. They're the same person. Please. Get out. ]_

 

 

  
  
I feel my body involuntarily shudder. The spear aches, there's no getting used to it.

 

"Please -- just _tell me_ \-- is -- is Jon -- is he alive?"

 

She tilts her head.

 

"Insofar as anyone is," she replies.

 

"Please, no riddles. I'll play all of your games and I'll do anything you want. _I need to know_."

 

"I know many things," she says, finally. "Many stories. But gathering them takes time. I have no better answer, though I wish I did. I am Mother, and no matter your deeds, I wish what is best for your child." 

 

Mother. Mother Earth? Mother goddess? There's plenty of those. I'm still no closer to understanding who she is. She smiles, gently, as the water from the spring plays at her hands.

 

Jon ... I suspect he'll be safe. Persephone-- Laura -- regardless of what she really is now -- Laura and her merry band of moping idealism with a side order of salt-the-earth wanton destruction are better protection than I could've carved out for him. She killed Ananke once. I have no doubt in the world she and her friends can slice Minerva-Ananke into ribbons in seconds.

 

And ... then what?

 

I always knew Ananke fed me the story on a need-to-know basis. I'm not an idiot. Do her miracles fade when she dies? Does it all just ... stop? It's her miracle that keeps him going, or so she said.

 

So _she_ said.

 

Maybe I need to stop thinking of her as a reliable source.

 

That's a good start.

 

"Many questions," the woman says, slowly making her way up the roots again. "And you have your time to consider them. But for now --"

 

"Right," I mutter. I'm sure my answers will still be far from enough.

 

"Who are you?"

 

"I ... ," a breath, a moment's pause. "A man who claimed to be a god."

 

"That is something you did, it is not something you are. You are still missing the forest for the trees." she pauses, eyeing the ancient ash behind us, and smiles wryly. "Apologies. Poor choice of words."

 

"But our actions make us who we are," I venture.

 

"Oh, of course. But no single action is all a person is. All the stories ever told would be awfully short and very boring if that were the case. Now. Who am I?"

 

I contemplate the tree. I contemplate the spear driven through me. I contemplate the time given to me to think, and to remember -- she just said she is Mother, but what Mother?

 

 

 

  _[ Ananke is Minerva. They're the same person. Please. Get out. ]_

 

 

 

I grit my teeth as the memory cuts through me. I remember everything. Everything I did. I remember his struggle. I remember the look in his eyes. And I remember everything after. _And still he sent the message_.

 

"Judgement," I reply. Because I _need_ her to be. Because I need _someone_ to be. Because I deserve _so much worse_.

 

She shakes her head, softly. "Your story is yours alone. Many will judge it. Some already have. But judgement is not knowledge. Judgement is not peace. And it is not who I am. Now. What is at the heart of the gods?"

 

"Falsehood," I say, without thinking twice. It was at the heart of _my_ godhood, and from what I've seen, at the heart of quite a few of the others. Petulant children, some killers, some simply happy to do anything for every petty whim and desire, every excess and every validation. I wasn't much better, but at least I was honest.

 

"Now, _that's_ interesting," she replies, smiling knowingly. "It all depends on what godhood is. Means. Depends on what can be true and false. But certainly something to keep in mind. You're learning."

 

Am I? It doesn't feel like I am.

 

I watch her, trying to comprehend who or what she is, and failing again and again. A skull is painted on her face with tribal markings, tattoos, maybe -- it's hard to say. She seems both out of place and not out of place here.

 

"And," she goes on, "what is at the heart of everything?"

 

"Order," I venture -- why else have this game of questions, why else have the gods and the Recurrence, the cycle and the rules and everything else?

 

"Certainly a building block," she nods. "But not the entirety of it."

 

She brings the bowl of water to me, I drink, and as it goes down, as cold and invigorating as before, she leans in.

 

"This is not a punishment, you must understand," she says.

 

The water lets my mind clear again, allows some calm. She's right. It's an opportunity at comprehension. I don't know how or where or why, but this is a different place altogether.

 

"Why me?" I ask, leaning back against the tree.

 

"She's had many toys like you before, you know. So many. You'd be surprised. Many toys, and many devils. There is no undoing a story, but you can change it, in the telling. Again and again, until she no longer understands it, and it no longer serves her. So _you_ no longer serve her. Unlike your predecessors, you carry the answer within you. It's only a matter of unearthing it."

 

She begins her descent from the roots, and soon, has disappeared again.

 

More cryptic responses, but as I feel the water's chill grasp me, I find them easy to remember. This is about Ananke. This is about me. This is about everything.

 

 

 

_[ Ananke is Minerva. They're the same person. Please. Get out. ]_

 

 

 

I didn't. Even this one last thing, I didn't do.

 

I'm sorry.


End file.
